How Strategy Execution Principles Can Help Fight the Spread of COVID-19

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and smart leaders and healthcare officials around the world are calling for people to dramatically change their behavior to prevent catastrophic outcomes related to the spread of COVID-19.

The Problem – It’s Very Difficult to Change People’s Behavior

As of 9:18 pm MDT on March 22, 2020, there have been 337,553 confirmed cases of Novel Coronavirus and 14,654 deaths in 192 countries, areas, or territories around the world. (As of March 31, at 10:30 pm MDT, there have been 858,892 confirmed cases and 42,158 deaths in 203 countries, areas, or territories.) Confirmed cases and death are growing exponentially across the world. Follow this link to see a chart showing the trajectory of confirmed cases worldwide: https://bit.ly/4DX_COVID-19. While China and South Korea are showing recent success in controlling the spread of the virus, most countries have not been successful in their efforts to “flatten the curve.”

While “stroke of the pen” mandates like forced event cancellations, mandated restaurant and bar closures, banned overseas travel, and compulsory cruise rescheduling can help control some behavior, these directives will NOT stop the spread of this virus. Individual behavior change driven by both the desire for self-preservation and a selfless concern for the welfare of others will be required – and so far, we are not seeing enough correct behavior from citizens around the world. We have a proven strategy for defeating this disease and as of right now, people around the world are not executing the plan. If we don’t get this figured out, the consequences will be dire.

Behavior Change Strategy Requires Discipline

I was on a team that studied the principles governing strategy that requires behavior change several years ago. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years since then helping people, teams, and organizations create discipline around these principles to accomplish everything from solving huge intractable business and societal problems to losing weight to potty-training 2-year-olds, and just about anything you can think of in between. Stopping COVID-19 seems to me to be the worthiest application of these disciplines, by far, that I’ve ever seen. These disciplines create conditions that engage people in doing what’s necessary in must-win situations like this, where “special treatment” and consistent behavior across a population of people are required for success.

Stay Focused on What’s “Wildly Important” – Principle of Focus

Some objectives, goals, and initiatives matter more than others. There are several important things that matter right now (primary elections in the United States for the Democratic party, plummeting oil prices, the record decline of the stock market, international terrorism, homelessness, organized crime, global warming, etc.) and defeating COVID-19 will required tremendous focus of resources and attention on this one thing – distractions in the coming days and weeks will extremely detrimental to our common objective. The Wildly Important Goal (WIG) for every nation in the world; every state, province, and territory; every city, community, and town; every neighborhood, block, and family; every individual is to stop COVID-19 as fast as possible by flattening the curve. There will be many more infections and deaths in the coming days and weeks, but if we can get everyone focused on this life or death objective very quickly, the devastating impact on lives and on the global economy will be dramatically limited. See my earlier LinkedIn post sharing an important article from medium.com on the effect of social distancing and the impact of failing to act quickly here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/cindrich_coronavirus-why-you-must-act-now-activity-6644048371533307904-u-dF

This discipline doesn’t ask us to stop doing our daily activities – rather it asks us to focus our finest attention and efforts on this goal and then to do as much as we can, under the circumstances, to live our lives normally. We have to eat and sleep; the lucky ones of us still have jobs and so we must work at home, if we can, or as safely as possible if we cannot (for those involved in healthcare, emergency services, transportation, grocery, some manufacturing, agriculture, etc.); many of us have summer-like childcare situations that require our attention; we still have snow to shovel, yards to maintain, food to buy and prepare, and television shows to binge-watch; etc. The whirlwind of normal life continues and yet we have a new objective – one we’ve never had before – to stop COVID-19!

Act on the Lead Measures – Principle of Leverage

Since the focus as been determined, we must now do the things required to win – the things that give us leverage against the virus. Levers act as a force multiplier, provide a mechanical advantage, and make work easier. We get this advantage as we eliminate the chronic inconsistency we typically see when working with people who need to do something new or different to succeed. Experts around the world have identified and relentlessly communicated the levers that will flatten the curve. These predictive behaviors, when aggregated and counted, become lead measures. Note the two types of lead measures to deploy: behavioral and small outcome.

Behavioral Lead Measures

This type of lead measure tracks how frequently a predictive behavior or activity is done. Examples for a WIG around stopping COVID-19 include:

• Wash your hands with soap every hour for 20 seconds
• Cough in your sleeve
• Stay home and don’t allow visitors
• Practice social distancing if you must leave your home
• Disinfect surfaces after each use
• Employees to check for any signs of illness before reporting to work each day and notify their supervisor if they become ill
• Self-quarantine for 14 days if infected

Small Outcome Lead Measures

This sort of lead measure serves as a weekly goal where an organization or team is responsible to produce a small outcome by the end of the week. Examples include:

• Abbott Labs shipping 1 million coronavirus tests per week
• The small town of Vò, in northern Italy, testing 100% of its citizens (even the asymptomatic) twice in a week
• Hospital systems ensuring face masks are available at triage for 100% of patients with respiratory symptoms
• Hospitals converting 30% of available beds to COVID-19 patients within a week’s notice
• A family limiting trips outside of the home to no more than 2 per week
• An office-worker having 100% of meetings on Zoom or some other virtual meeting platform
• Reduce the number of people on Clearwater Beach in Pinellas County, Florida in the United States to no more than 100 per day

So, we know what to do. We’ve seen it on the news and read about it online for weeks now, and yet we still have people who haven’t changed their behavior. I’ll admit that we had a birthday party at our house last week that was attended by 18 asymptomatic friends and family members who swore they’ve been staying at home and my daughter just texted to tell me that she is going to a friend’s “quarantine party” tonight. My family is part of the problem – I’m writing this article to help make up for my own failure to do the right thing. And this is where the next two disciplines come in. They help us eliminate chronic behavioral inconsistency by inspiring people to do the right thing when it’s hard or inconvenient and when we’re busy.

Keep a Compelling Scoreboard – Principle of Engagement

People engage (proactively and creatively contribute to or willingly take part in or comply with) when they feel like they are valued members of a winning team doing stuff that matters in a high-trust environment. Scoreboards help address the “winning team” part of engagement. You can’t win if you aren’t keeping score. If we’re going to beat the coronavirus, we need to do a better job of scorekeeping. Scoreboards, when done right, give people access to data. Data is like light. Light lets people see and light is an amazing disinfectant. For scoreboards to be effective, they need to show how we’re performing on the goal AND how we’re doing on the lead measures.

Right now, we have only international, national, and regional data on the number of infections and deaths. We know we are, for the most part, losing, but we don’t have access to the data that shows exactly why. We are not tracking how we’re doing on the levers of success. Every morning we wake up to the “this is a nightmare!” realization that a growing number of people died during the previous day, and even more people were found to be infected. Why is this happening? Because people aren’t moving the lead measures by doing the things that work to slow the spread of the virus. Why aren’t we doing what we’ve been asked to do – what most of us know we should do? Because we aren’t yet willing to allow our lives to be completely disrupted by this virus. We’ve got stuff to do. Why does proper scoreboarding help? James R. Ball explained why in his book, DNA Leadership through Goal-Driven Management, when he wrote:

The primary stimulus for your actions is the mental tension you create in your mind when you become aware of the gap between where you are and where you [should] to be. Once you become aware of this gap, you subconsciously and consciously will begin to find ways to bridge it.

People are unaware of where they are compared to where they should be. We haven’t created enough “mental tension.” Almost all human beings want to know where they stand compared to a standard, how they compare to others, and how they are doing over time. So, what does that look like? Here are some examples:

• My friend and colleague Scott Miller and his wife Stephanie “gamified” hand washing for their three young boys. Their family standard is to wash their hands every hour. They are tracking that behavioral lead measure every day with a goal of not getting the virus in their home. So far, they are winning, and these very active boys have never felt so good about having hands so clean. (We’ll see how they do after the virus has run its course!)
• Communities could start tracking the number of infected citizens, percentage recovered, and the percentage of community members tested each day with a United Way-like thermometer or graph showing progress and placed outside in front of public facilities and charts updated real-time or at least weekly on civic websites.
• If leaders won’t shut down the beach (stroke of the pen action that forces behavior change), the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department could do an hourly count of the number of people on Clearwater Beach and post the number on a makeshift chart on the side of one of the lifeguard stations.
• CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news outlets could continue to share charts on the extent to which we are flattening the curve while sharing additional data showing state-by-state comparison of the percentage of people working from home, the percentage of people getting tested, the ratio of available hospital beds to citizens, and the number of citations for people gathering in non-familial groups of more than ten. Look, we have zero live sports to watch and this may be the only competition we can enjoy for months to come!

When people start playing this game of war against the virus “under the lights” of both predictive and outcome data, we will see them step up their performance. We will all do better. That’s what winners do when they look at a scoreboard and they “see” that they are losing. We will win together, or we will lose together. Scoreboards help us know the score so we can adjust our individual and collective behavior to ensure the win. Scoreboards create friendly competition where we push each other to do the best we can to combat a shared viral enemy.

Establish a Regular Rhythm of Accountability – Principle of Accountability

Accountability increases the likelihood of winning because it supports persistence in the face of adversity, boredom, discouragement, and distraction. Right in the middle of the word “accountability” is the word “count.” We are counting on each other to do our individual parts to fight this tiny infectious foe and win. Accountability is a second performance-improving mechanism that helps us do better and stay focused on the objective in the face of competing priorities, fatigue, and early failure. In times of crisis, the cadence of accountability can be several times a day. Under normal circumstances the appropriate rhythm is usually weekly.

This Discipline asks people to answer one critical question, repeatedly: What are the one or two things I will do between now and our next accountability session to help the team win? As busy as we are, when we voice a commitment to others our integrity kicks in and we usually perform better because we don’t want to let others down by not following through. During each accountability session, we report to each other on the status of our commitments, we review the current score, and we make commitments to each other about what we’ll do during the next time period to make a difference. There are no excuses when we are executing on something as wildly important as stopping COVID-19. My commitment this week was to write this article for LinkedIn so I could post it before going to bed tonight. I believe people are counting on me to share what I know about strategy execution in a way that can be helpful to others around the world. I commit to every reader that I will practice social distancing in the coming weeks, and I will stay positive and encouraging in my social media communications. Hold me accountable and be accountable to do your part to help us win.

PS – Turns out my daughter was just joking with me about going to that party…

If you found this article helpful, please give it a “like,” add your comments and insights, then share with others who can do something to help stop the impact of COVID-19. If you enjoy articles like this, I invite you to follow me on LinkedIn.